


Clipped Wings

by dragonshost



Category: Fairy Tail
Genre: F/F, F/M, Post-Tartaros Arc (Fairy Tail), not flattering to Jellal, please forgive weird tense changes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2018-12-04 06:45:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11549688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonshost/pseuds/dragonshost
Summary: This wasn't freedom.





	1. Chapter 1

This wasn't freedom.

Sorano knew it wasn't, knew it was a huge mistake, that she'd chosen wrong, the instant the new chains fell around her. She could not see them, but she felt them, and they dug bloody furrows into her soul just as surely as any iron shackles. Grasping, pinching, rubbing against the tender parts to form new callouses where she'd only just begun to scrape the old ones off.

But she had chosen this, she reminded herself.

Freedom - true freedom - would be hers if she could just endure this. If she just put in her time, shed enough blood, enough tears. Then the chains would loosen, and she would be released. Free at last.

She had chosen this. Of her own... free... will.

...Hadn't she? She had... right?

Some days, it was hard to convince herself of that, remembrance and bitterness keen-edged daggers between her ribs.

And _her._ Sorano couldn't hardly stand to look at _her_.

The one who was free, was not forced into chains alike to hers. A woman with footsteps in scarlet that tread lightly where Sorano's dragged with weight, leaving deep impressions in the muck to show her passing. Where Sorano's were hunched by the weight, _her_ shoulders were straightened, no longer bent by her own chains.

How Sorano envied her her freedom. Weren't they the same, in so many ways? Hadn't _that place_ (that horrible nightmare Tower) been both their starting points, their lives stretching beyond? So why was _hers_ a path, while Sorano's was a pitfall?

From long ago, Sorano remembered her mother telling her that women were born with wings, wings that could take them far away from everything that troubled them. What was the point of clinging to those words, Sorano wondered these many years later - the words of a woman long since dead? (It wasn't as if her mother had managed to find her own sky in the end, anyway.) But cling Sorano still did, to the whispered promise of the sky.

Looking at the other woman, as she moved about the campsite speaking to Sorano's brothers, her closest companions, she remembered again her mother's words, and saw wings. Scarlet, sprouting from corded muscle - tattered around the edges, but strong and proud.

And Sorano couldn't help but feel her own, bound against her skin and clipped, no longer able to soar.

Not that they had ever gotten the chance to in the first place.


	2. Chapter 2

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a girl born with scarlet wings. They were beautiful, and she was loved by many.

One day, people took her away from her home, and locked her in a cage of stone and suffering, surrounded by the gray sea. There, her wings were chained down, because even in a cage they could not be allowed to spread, lest others follow suit and realize that their cage's lock was more flimsy than it seemed.

At last, she was set free by a boy with blue wings.

When he did, he broke hers. So she would never fly without him, so she would always stay in reach of his grasping hands.

And so she made herself a framework out of the wreckage of her chains; piece by piece she constructed beautiful steel wings to hide her destroyed ones. For many years, she used them, pretended they were real - came to believe that those were her wings (instead of the ones twisted and torn).

But they weighed her down, and though they shone in the light they could not allow her to reach for the sky.

Then the boy with blue wings dragged her back into the cage, a crystal tomb. And the girl with steel feathers saw for the first time the black rot on his, held in the damp and the dark for far too long.

It was then that the girl finally realized that the rot lay on her own feathers, neglected and tattered. So she threw away the cage of steel she'd surrounded them with, and faced the sky.

She fell.

Her friends pulled her from the water's grasp, back into feather soft warmth and love. Her wings were broken once again, but now they would heal - out in the sun, in the light.

But of the boy...

Like Icarus, he had vanished into the sea.

When next they met, there were only stumps left where his wings had been, and a vacancy in his eyes.

* * *

Years had gone by, years she had not been a part of. The world changed, the sky changed. And the boy... the boy's wings had never grown back. What was gone could not be replaced.

She stayed by his side when she could.

Her wings were not bound, nor broken any longer.

But it was in a cage that she flew. A cage he put on those around him - to protect them because they could not fly, he claimed.

He could not see that in his loneliness, he was trying to keep them from flying far beyond his reach.

She of scarlet wings had willingly walked into his cage, in the hopes of someday showing him that he didn't need it after all.

* * *

So you see, you whose wings are freshly fallen snow, unsullied by the mud where they rest, your wings are not clipped. Merely caged.

Someday, you will walk out of here, free.

And you will fly.

I promise you this.


End file.
